Sei
by PinkWhirlWind
Summary: Spike begins to return to himself, once again on the Bebop, coversation between Jet and Spike
1. Default Chapter

Sei By Nix Winter  
  
Disclaimers: I do not own Cowboy Bebop, not the world nor the characters Warnings: This story is set after the series. Spike doesn't die and I don't have nearly good enough handle on the Bebop world, but I was having fun and that's the point. Hope you enjoy, if not, gomen nasai. And it will likely be a yaoi fic, though not Jet/Spike.  
  
Sei  
  
No one wants to be alone. By the time one accepts the aloneness, it's either just a matter of waiting to die or of just pretending that need's not there anymore. Spike really didn't know which it was for him, but when he thought about it, it was just waiting to die. The kid and the dog were gone, though he got emails from her every month or so. Julia was gone and she didn't send emails. Jet had found Spike in a hotel room, more than half dead with untreated wounds and a soul that didn't know how to leave the body.  
  
Spike was Jet's partner and for better or worse, he'd always come to find his friend, or he would if he knew where to look for him. Jet set the plate of food on the table and shoved it a little closer. "It's got beef in it, Spike."  
  
That lifted Spike's chin a little, but didn't bring any life to those dark eyes. Jet tried not to grind his teeth. He'd had the nightmare again. That was why he'd broken out the beef for Spike. The nightmare of when he'd found Spike, after much searching, found the tall man laying naked on the hotel bed, blood stained the sheets, darkened even the bruises on the body, dried over pale skin. Jet didn't think he'd ever forget wrapping that body in the bedspread, lifting it in his arms. It had been Spike's business, what he did, but jet had found that it was his as well. "Green peppers and beef, Spike."  
  
"Jet," Spike said, his voice very soft, "How long have I been here?"  
  
Jet dropped his chopsticks. "Spike!"  
  
Those long fingers sought his own chopsticks, the scent of beef and spice actually touching him this time, making his mouth less dry. "How long?"  
  
"Eleven months." Jet picked up his and chased around in his food without much success. Spike hadn't spoken in all the time he'd been back on the Bebop. He'd wander around the ship as if he were looking for something, worked his katas slowly, for hours, days at a time, it seemed sometimes. "Talk to me, Spike, talk to me."  
  
"I don't know what to say," he said, then lifted a strip of beef to his mouth. Jet's cooking wasn't great, but it wasn't bad, and for the first time in so long he couldn't remember, the sauce, pepper and ginger and beef flavor tasted good. It spread out over his tongue as he pressed the bit to the roof of his mouth. The sat in silence as he chewed that one, swallowed, sucked a green pepper into mush. "I'm really alive?"  
  
"Yeah, Spike," Jet said, "You're alive."  
  
"Why? I thought all the heroes died at the end of the story." Then there was a sip of tea. "Julia's dead. Her breathing slipped away, just like I wasn't holding her."  
  
One of the servos in Jet's elbow stiffened and he flexed his arm to get it limber again. "You ain't a hero, Spike, like some guy in a story. We're just real folks. There ain't nothing fancy about death. It only makes everything before it okay because people don't like to talk bad about the dead. Creeps them out."  
  
"Yeah, I guess," Spike said and Jet thought there was something a bit more alive in the voice, the words. "I thought I died when she left me."  
  
"Yeah," Jet said, agreeing as he thought about his own lost lover. "But then you find out they got big mortgage and they still want some skinny little shit."  
  
"But you got the bounty."  
  
"Yeah, I got the bounty. And you cooked for a week while I sulked."  
  
"It's been eleven months. I was just waiting to die, you know? When I went to fight Vicious. He was my friend and my partner."  
  
"Seems like he was an asshole to me." Jet shoved the last half of his food onto Spike's plate. Spike lifted an eyebrow, then stirred it all together and didn't object.  
  
"We were partners, fought back to back."  
  
"You killed him."  
  
"Yeah. And her too, at least because of me." Spike poured himself some more tea. "What am I supposed to wait for now?"  
  
"Life ain't about waiting," Jet said, remembering how he'd felt when he threw that watch into the water. "Life's about what's going on now, about beef and friends, bonsai and hell if I know what it's about. It's about enjoying what one's got."  
  
"It hurts." Spike said, closing his eyes, drawing small circles in the ginger sauce with the ends of his chopsticks. "At first I knew the pain was just because my body was fucked up, and I thought the pain would stop. I thought I'd wake up one day and get up off the couch and it wouldn't hurt. Julia and Vicious are dead. I don't belong alive. I think I hurt because I'm supposed to be a ghost."  
  
"You wouldn't be eating beef if you were supposed to be a ghost. I don't know what you're supposed to do, but you're alive, so you better eat your food before it get cold, cuz I ain't gonna warm it up for you."  
  
Spike started really working on his food. Between bites, he asked, "Faye?"  
  
"Went home. Stole one of my trees."  
  
Almost as intense as the first taste of ginger and pepper, the small laugh seemed to lift him up inside, to gray out the black that shrouded him. "She liked me."  
  
"Yeah, but I didn't tell her I found you. You could shock the shit out of her, if you wanted."  
  
Spike felt guilty when he realized he was smiling. Like the laser on the Swordfish II, healing seemed to have charged and then fired off it's blast all at once. "I'd probably just find her running around with some little guy, or some chick, and in debt up to her eyebrows. How come everyone gets with someone 'cept us?"  
  
"Speak for yourself," Jet said, leaning back on the couch and watching across the table, accessing by habit how Spike was doing physically. "I have my trees."  
  
Spike pressed a finger to his temple, made a funny face, as if that comment were giving him odd images.  
  
"Now Spike!" Jet said, feeling quite uncomfortable with where this conversation were going, not even thinking about how really very normal it was and that he'd been waiting for nearly a year to hear Spike's voice in anything other than protests and cries in nightmares.  
  
"Jet." Spike reproved him, then finished off the meal. "It's not like I'm hitting on you."  
  
"I'm glad you're back. I missed you."  
  
Spike stood, stretched, long arms going over head, back arching. "I was kind of gone for awhile? I don't remember, Jet. I don't remember anything from when I fell down the stairs until you put that beef in front of me, not really anyway. It's all gray, like it wasn't really me."  
  
"Well, now you're back," Jet said, grinning as he set his plate down on top of Spike's empty one. "Your turn to do the dishes."  
  
That brought a snort from Spike, but he stood and took the dishes with him. Yeah, he was alive, and he wasn't a hero, just a person. Heroes didn't come back from the dead and get told to do the dishes. No, that was just the real folk's kinda of blues. "We oughta get a dog."  
  
"Are you possessed," Jet asked Spike's back.  
  
"Yeah, maybe. I wanna get a dog."  
  
"No kids."  
  
"No women."  
  
"Okay, we can get a dog." Jet agreed.  
  
Chapter Two Getting a dog  
  
Neither of them wanted to go to Mars or Ganymede, and despite what that woman had said, *** dogs weren't all that common nor were they cheap.  
  
It didn't seem like a big deal to Jet, Spike's hunt for a dog, but it kept the man busy and distracted from problems that Jet knew weren't going to get solved. There was a lot of relief in having Spike moving around, talking, complaining, even playing music again. Jet had started to wonder if the man were ever going to come out of the half comatose state he had stayed in for so long. 


	2. JetFaye kiss

Evil Angel 4/?  
  
Disclaimers... I don't own Cowboy Bebop... but there is a movie coming out.. I don't own that either, alas, but I hope we all go see it!   
  
Warnings: I need a beta reader.. does that tell you anything? I'm writing this for fun and my own spiritual growth, so na! there's a kiss in this, and it's a het kiss *HUGE WIDE EYES* Soooo not like me.. but hey.. muses will be muses. It's a Jet/Faye kiss....  
Faye did not really want to meet the doctor who'd worked on Spike. She really didn't want to hear about what Vicious could do with a katana or what she was going to have to do to be helpful. Now that she'd talked to Spike, actually, as disturbing as that conversation had been, she didn't feel as generous to the man as she had. Love him? Standing in the room they'd been shown too, arms across her chest, staring out the window at a garden too beautiful for Mars, she didn't know if she loved him or not. Drunk on the Bebop she'd wanted him back at any cost, and that hadn't really changed, but she wanted Spike, rude, charming, lazy Spike, not a pale invalid who didn't even know his own name. She had her own problems with not remembering things. Maybe, she thought, sniffing back tears she wasn't going to cry, maybe she just resented not being remembered. Everyone she'd ever loved had forgotten her, really.  
  
"Faye," Jet called to her from where he sat in front of a computer terminal, rubbing the back of his neck and sorting through the manifest of improvements and repairs made to the Bebop. "Faye, all of this is being charged to your account."  
  
It made him extremely uncomfortable. On paper, Faye owned nearly half of his ship now, or at least she could claim it if she wanted.  
  
"What?" Faye launched herself across the hotel like room and spun the monitor around, quickly moving to a different information source. That blond demon had said something about her debts, about an income, but then she'd said they could watch what was happening with Spike and the damn man had nearly died twice more before they were finished with him and then the wait until they saw him, and Faye had forgotten about her accounts.  
  
The figure in her account couldn't be real. She sat, hitting Jet's lap then sliding off towards the floor until he caught her and set her on the couch. Six million woolongs had bled out of her account in the last 18 hours, for hardware repairs and consumable supplies, but there was still a healthy two million to the positive in the account. Faye's chest closed off and she didn't know if she'd remember how to breath or not. She desperately wanted her debts back! The Red Dragon Syndicate owned her, owned her identity, her accounts, her family history, even the very air she wasn't sure she wanted to breathe! "Jet!"  
  
He crossed his arms and leaned back against the sofa. "Don't lose your head."  
  
Faye went limp, sprawling out on the couch, then slowly moving to lay back and look at the ceiling, all without saying a word. It wasn't like they could really say much of anything. There probably wasn't a secure place to talk in the whole biodome. "So, Jet, you really want to be Spike's lover? You want to be top or bottom?"  
  
He groaned and shoved her feet off his knees as he got up. "Woman! That's not a question to ask a man."  
  
She sat up then, leaning forward, elbows on her knees. "Why not? I want him. You think, maybe he could want me? I'm not as pretty as she is. She's really pretty and powerful."  
  
Jet fiddled with his arm just a bit, adjusting some hydraulic mechanism that seemed to get out of sync when his blood pressure went up. "You're beautiful, Faye. I'd rather have you at my back than any woman I ever knew. I don't know that Spike's going to be looking for a lover in either of us. She's had him pretty tight for a long time. We came in here to get him and get out, that's it. What I said when I was drunk, that was just drink."  
  
"She's a liar. She used him." Faye scratched her cheek softly as she started looking through her accounts again. It wasn't that long ago that she'd found her old home, started to remember being that girl on the video tape. Sometimes she just felt completely out of sync with reality though, like so many little things had changed from before her accident to now that no matter how she looked young and looked like she fit in, she really didn't and never would. Julia had even used her to send a message to Spike, a message that triggered Spike's going off to die, well, almost die. How could a woman that Spike loved so much set him up like that? But Faye didn't trust her even more because of that moment when she'd looked into her eyes, seen how much Julia loved Spike, she really loved him. "She'll come back for him, Jet. No matter how far we go. And he'll want her, open his arms for her. Nothing I can give him will be good enough."  
  
"What kind of talk is that," Jet snarled, rounding on her. "You're a gambler, Faye, and less than a day ago we would have gambled anything to get him back, just the chance to get him back. Spike is alive and we're leaving with him. We have a ship and we have food. Speaking of which, where's Ed and Ein?"  
  
Fay sat up a bit more. "I don't know. Don't they have to be here to hear what this doctor has to say too?"  
  
"Ein is not helping to take care of Spike." Jet said, looking at Faye as if she'd lost it. "Ed, well, she ought to go back to Earth."  
  
"I think it's too late to keep her out of this mess. Julia herself sent for Ed. Shit, Jet, she sent for Ed before she decided to save Spike. Or do you think she always mean to save Spike."  
  
"I don't want to talk about it." Now it was Jet's turn to stare out into the garden. "Faye, what about me? Could you want me?" He hadn't meant to ask, hadn't thought about it before the words slipped out of his mouth, but there they were. He felt old and only half there, half made of metal, and a gnome compared to the blond demon that Spike loved. "Never mind," he spat just as fast as the words had come in the first place and strode towards the bathroom.  
  
The words caught Faye by surprise, complete surprise. "Jet!" She jumped up from the couch, mind going a mile a minute. Love and sex, it didn't make as much sense as she'd like and while she could look at Spike and feel like she was going to melt, suddenly, she realized that Jet was ... Was more than just ... Just she didn't know, but she needed emotionally and sexually, she needed more than she could put into nice little words or frame in some healthy understanding. Quickly she ran around the coffee table with the computer and across the room to catch his hand. Metal against soft skin, but she held him until he stopped and turned to look at her. With one hand she reached up, feeling intensely shy and touched one sideburn, the bushy black at the side of his face. "Jet." She smiled as she said it and squeezed his hand. "I don't know how to do this. All I know real well is running away."  
  
Jet's flesh hand came around and caught her hand, pressing her fingers to his cheek, as he studied her face. "If my heart starts it don't quite easy."  
  
"Could your heart start for me? I mean, cuz we both want him, but could you want me too?"  
  
He leaned forward then, still holding her hand against his cheek, and touched his lips to hers, softly like a bear and a fox. The kiss was gentle, more about his heart than about the lust that she'd seemed to fear. She leaned into the kiss, choosing to open to him and being surprised by how sweet it felt, how right as her tongue slipped past his lips, seeking his tongue. He moaned softly, forgetting that his cybernetic arm wasn't soft flesh as he slid it up her back to cup her head and pull her close, forgetting to keep the distance between them. She rose up on the balls of her feet, nearly bare legs leaning against his and they answered each others' questions. 


End file.
